One of the most convenient and secure ways of protecting electronic devices and/or electronic data is to use biometric signals for authenticating a user.
The human vein structure as a biometric signal has drawn attention in recent years, for example, as disclosed in: N. Miura, A. Nagasaka, and T. Miyatake, “Feature extraction of finger vein patterns based on iterative line tracking and its application to personal identification,” Syst. Comput. Japan, vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 61-71, 2004; J. Yang and Y. Shi, “Towards finger-vein image restoration and enhancement for finger-vein recognition,” Inf. Sci. (Ny)., vol. 268, no. 07, pp. 33-52, 2014; and P. Gupta and P. Gupta, “An accurate finger vein based verification system,” Digital Signal Processing, vol. 38, pp. 43-52, 2015. Theoretically, vein structures should be specific for each person and so can be used as a biometrical signal.
Biometric authentication systems for consumer electronics handheld devices, such as smartphones or tablets are limited by size, cost and computational capacity.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an image processing apparatus which is suitable for incorporation into such devices.